Beyonce drops surprise 40-track ‘Homecoming’ album

Beyonce has dropped a surprise 40-track companion album of her “Homecoming” 2018 Coachella performance to accompany the Netflix documentary about the event that arrived early this morning.

The album includes two bonus cuts near the end: “Before I Let Go” and “I Been On.” The former is a cover of a Frankie Beverly & Maze classic featured in the documentary’s closing credits, while the latter is an updated version of a song that was uploaded to SoundCloud back in 2013; “Bow Down” was included on the singer’s self-titled album that year.

Rumors of a new album called “B7” spread in the hours before the live album’s release based on a cover image of an album bearing that title taken from the Genius lyric-decoding website, however that may have been a placeholder built by the website in anticipation of a possible “Homecoming” soundtrack album; a search on “Beyonce B7 Genius” led to the “Homecoming” lyrics on Wednesday morning. Since the surprise release of her self-titled album, rumors (credible and otherwise) of imminent Beyonce albums have circulated several times.

In our review of the performance last year, Variety wrote: “Part of the brilliance of Saturday’s set was that it was more of a half-time show than her half-time show, in that she took the marching band that has been persona non grata at the Bowl for years and built a 105-minute performance around overpacked horn charts, glorified drum majorettes and nonstop drumline insanity. Who would’ve guessed the missing ingredients needed to ratchet her catalog a step up into greatness were exceptionally arranged tubas and timbales? It was an over-the-top Busby Berkeley Hollywood musical brought to the modern day by way of the great HBCU marching units of the South, and it was fairly glorious.”